Cupertino City Council last night voted unanimously to approve Apple’s planning application for the circular campus building first presented to council members by Steve Jobs in 2011, in what was to turn out to be his last public appearance before his death. It was Steve Jobs who nicknamed the building the ‘spaceship.’

Although the approval is still subject to a final vote on 15th November, the San Jose Mercury News reports that this is merely a formality.

Now that the project has been approved, the council by regulation must meet one more time on Nov. 15 for a final and largely perfunctory vote. The spaceship, for all practical purposes, has now been approved for liftoff.

You can view a gallery of photos of a detailed model below the fold …expand full story

Reliable sources recently provided 9to5Mac with official blueprints of Apple Campus 2 that detail and illustrate the mammoth project currently in development. (These are just a few of the confidential images.)

Solar panels cover the main building’s entire roof, and the images above depict additional outdoor and indoor aspects of the new structure. The exclusive slides named Foster + Partners as one of the architecture firms working on the project, and they cited Arup for consulting engineering, OLIN for landscape architecture, and Davis Langdon for construction. Previous reports indicated that construction is supposed to start later this year.

Given that comforting sanity check, I measured the diameter of the Apple spaceship as 1615 ft, plus or minus a few ft., depending on where one places the ruler. That’s a radius of 807.5 ft.

The outside measurement on the plans is 760′ but the large outside shader structures could account for the additional size.

Interestingly, that is a bigger footprint than the world’s largest office building, the Pentagon, which at five stories tall, two basement levels and with a smaller courtyard, still has significantly more usable square footage.

Also (using our geometry skillz) plugging the 1615 ft diameter into a perfectly round circle, you get an outside circumference of just under a mile (5074 ft). That means taking some paperwork all the way to HR might be a lunch killer.

Update: Obama Pacman notes that Apple could install 3 full sized Football fields in the courtyard (below).expand full story